


complete: (adjective); having all the necessary or appropriate parts

by CallMeBombshell



Category: Firefly
Genre: Character Study, Family of Choice, Found Families, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-03 01:42:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19453750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallMeBombshell/pseuds/CallMeBombshell
Summary: Sometimes River thinks that she’s remade herself anew every day of her existence, birthed herself of the shell of her old self every morning, every waking, every time she’s opened her eyes. She’s still not quite right, still too sharp and too jagged and too hurtful, still too full of holes and empty places. She’s still more danger than safety, still more question than answer, still more thing than girl most days.





	complete: (adjective); having all the necessary or appropriate parts

Of all of them on this boat they call home, River thinks Jayne is the easiest to understand.

Cobb; cobbled. Put together from bits, all hazard and haphazard and not fitting right but still working fine. Grating when he’s sober; weepy when he’s not; crude around women but playful around children; claims to be greedy but River knows he’s more loyal than he thinks, and doesn’t know that he can be both at once. Jayne is made of so many parts, scraps of so many people and places, so much patchwork that he doesn’t realize he’s both whole and holes.    
  
River knows something about that, on the days where she can hold her own (w)holes in, when they don’t come spilling out like apple bits coming back up, recognizable but damaged, ruined but not destroyed.    
  
She cut Jayne with a knife, once, and he never lets it go, always flashing sharp and shiny in his mind when he knows she’s around. But he never does anything, either, aside from harsh words that she knows (deep down, down where she knows Mal will keep her and that Zoe will protect her and Kaylee will watch over her and Wash understands her and Book forgives her and Inara is believes in her and Simon loves her) that Jayne will never really do what he threatens, because Jayne is mercenary and hard and cold uncaring sometimes, but he is not cruel, no matter what he likes to believe.   
  
She could tell him that, maybe, but she doubts he’d understand. He wouldn’t comprehend. It weren’t him she was cutting, even, just the ones he was wearing, the ones wrapped in foil and around cans in the kitchen, the ones twisted ‘round her insides like bits of wire digging under skin, the ones who hunt her and lurk in corners everywhere she looks, in packaging and advertisements and branding and the hard eyes of people who look at her and can’t quite tell why she unsettles them so. 

She envies Jayne that, sometimes: that people look at Jayne and know exactly who is is. There is a comfort in that, in being so easily known, so easily identified and quantified and planned-for. Jayne is a constant; River is a variable in another equation altogether.   
  
She could tell Jayne that, but for all that he’s made of bits, he’s more solid than not, all strong bolts and welding. Jayne’s bits like her but he’s not pieces like her, and he doesn’t understand that sometimes a thing is not a thing, but something else; that a girl is not a girl, but everyone else. Sometimes the foil packet is full of food to make her strong, and sometimes it’s full of chemicals to make her lost. Sometimes the girl holds an apple in her hands and sometimes she holds a knife. Sometimes she  _ is _ the knife.

Jayne watches her with wary eyes, and sometimes with fear, but he’s never looked at her with hatred, and he’s never looked at her cold and clinical like the doctors who she tries not to remember.

River watches Jayne slide his guns into his holsters, a knife into the sheath at his lower back, getting ready for a job. 

She wonders what he would do if she asked him to show her how to use them. She knows how, of course, knowledge shoved into her head like trash shoved in a bin; she knows if she holds a gun her body will know what to do, but she won’t be able to explain to anyone  _ how _ she knows (she won’t be able to explain it to herself, even; that part disturbs her less, though). 

Jayne would be a good teacher, she thinks. Jayne’s weapons are precious to him, shaded rosy and well-loved in his mind. He cares for them with careful eyes and even more careful hands, sinks himself into the patterns of it like Inara at her meditation, his mind going blank except for the motions of taking them apart and cleaning each piece with a gentle cloth before reassembling them. 

River wonders if maybe he would teach her that part, too, how to break down something so violent, so destructive, with so much care and respect; how to wipe all the pieces down, all traces of their purpose made to disappear until they’re made new and shiny and clean. She wonders if maybe Jayne could show her how to put the pieces back together, functional and whole, to be stored somewhere safe until they’re needed again.

River was born a girl, born a person, but then they took her apart and remade her as a weapon, one without a purpose, without pieces to be taken apart and cleaned. She’s unpredictable and dangerous, a trigger which needs to finger to pull it, but which sometimes gets pulled anyway, attached to a barrel which never fires the same rounds twice.

She’s not surprised that Jayne is wary of her; he’s never yet met a weapon he didn’t understand, and he doesn’t know what to make of her. River doesn’t know what to make of herself, either.

Maybe, she thinks, someday they could figure it out together.

If she has to be a weapon, River thinks, there are worse things than being taken care of by someone like Jayne.

  
  
  


\---

  
  
  


Jayne’s easiest to understand, but Wash is easiest to be near. 

Wash’s first name is Hoban. River doesn’t like it; it doesn’t suit him, too much dust and not enough stars.

Wash doesn’t like it either, never uses it except when he absolutely has to. Doesn’t much like his last name, either, too much a reminder of a dead-eyes mother and a disappointed father left behind in the smog and stinging clouds. The day Wash broke through the cloud cover for the first time and truly saw the sky, it cracked his heart open wide, wider than could ever be fixed, and he never wanted it to. He sailed away and never looked back.

So he chops up his name, leaves the -burne behind with the rest of the chemical burning and becomes just Wash, just drifts and eddies, just downdraft from takeoff and Serenity’s wake making ripples between stars.

The only time Wash has ever liked his name was the day that Zoe decided it was hers. She holds it better than he ever did, anyway, he thinks. River agrees.

Wash’s mind is quiet and cool like shady groves, like the canopy ceiling of the classroom she thinks she remembers, sometimes. Wash’s thoughts are rain, pitter-patter sprinkles and grey and soothing. He thinks in time to the whirring of Serenity’s engines, the soft beeping of the console in front of him, the in-out hush of the air cyclers in the quiet of the bridge.

Sometimes late at night (ship’s night, artificial and arbitrary but sacred, too, this time set aside for no reason than because they need it, bodies and minds needing time to rest, time to settle, time to just be without needing to be anything particular), River tiptoes across the cool floor and curls slowly in the chair at the copilot’s station and rests her arms on her drawn-up knees, head on her arms, and she watches Wash fly.

He never startles, even though she knows he’s easy to startle, even though she never makes a noise, never lets him know she’s there. There is nothing that happens on the bridge that Wash doesn’t know about, an awareness more profound even than Mal’s, whose heart seems to beat in time with Serenity’s. River is used to going unnoticed when she wants, used to be silent and stealthy and invisible; but here, curled behind Serenity’s eyes, Wash always seems to see her without ever looking her way.

It’s comforting, being known; knowing that he is aware of her but sees no need to pay attention to her. While Wash flies, eyes flicking from screen to stars as regularly as a clock’s ticking, River can just  _ be _ . Just be a girl, just be a mind, just be a consciousness. Wash holds them all up with his hands on the yoke; he doesn’t mind if River doesn’t hold herself together here.

Wash talks to himself when he flies. He talks to his screens, to his readings, to the stars. He talks to his dinosaurs, and makes them talk back. River likes that talking the best, because Wash changes his voice for each of them but always just sounds like Wash, warm and amused and more clever than people realize.

She tried to make the dinosaurs talk, herself, once, but her own voice sounded wrong and she couldn’t find theirs in her throat, either. She went and found Wash, instead, sat in the chair beside him at the table in the galley and listened to him trade banter with Jayne and Book, quick and sure. 

Wash has never had to struggle to make his words do what he wants, even when he isn’t sure what to say. River wonders if he could teach her how to make her own words work, the ones that catch in her throat and come out all scrambled, meaning lost in the things she can’t pull out of her head. He’d probably try at least, if she asked him. 

She doesn’t ask.

  
  
  


\---

  
  
  


When River was seven, she won a gold medal at a dance competition; gold for richness, gold for beauty, gold for perfection. 

At least, she thinks she did.

She remembers the music, lilting and sweeping, strings and woodwinds, something that could be rustic if not for the elegant grace of it. She remembers her skirt, pale pink and swishing, swirling around her ankles like eddies in a stream, flaring out like butterfly wings when she spun, arms lifted just so above her head.

She remembers the lights, and the giddy smile on her face, and that she loved it more than anything. She thinks it’s her memory; it feels like hers.

But then, River remembers plenty of things that aren’t hers.

On her good days, she thinks she can tell them apart: can tell the ones that really happened from the ones that didn’t; the ones that belong to her from the ones that she took unknowing, unwilling, from other people, the ones she thinks sometimes they gave her on purpose.

On her bad days, when everything swirls together and she can’t puzzle the pieces of herself together so they fit, when the red string of her own self is abandoned on the floor in the dust, lost amid the labyrinth, Ariadne chasing ghosts and forgetting her own name—

On those days, she picks the memories that make her happy, or made someone happy sometime, and curls them around herself, invents a new person from all the ragged scraps inside her head, and lets herself sink into that new person, warm and safe like a baby.

Sometimes River thinks that maybe she wasn’t a whole person even before that place, the place of needles and chemicals and cold metal and harsh lights. Sometimes she thinks the reason they look her is that they knew, knew that she was something hollow, something brimming over but holding nothing in the end. 

Sometimes River thinks that she’s remade herself anew every day of her existence, birthed herself of the shell of her old self every morning, every waking, every time she’s opened her eyes. She’s still not quite right, still too sharp and too jagged and too hurtful, still too full of holes and empty places. She’s still more danger than safety, still more question than answer, still more thing than girl most days.

But she’s getting better, she thinks, getting better at filling in those places with things that are bright and soft and warm, things that are strong and sturdy and lasting. She’s learning to feel out her own edges, the limits of where everyone else stops and where she herself begins. Here, on this ship, out in the black away from the crowd and the cacophony and the chaos, she’s learned to separate them all, the bits of the others that flow into and through her like downy feathers on the breeze. She’s learned to catch hold of them as they pass, let them fill her up on the inhale and let them go again on the exhale, breathing in all these people around her who have become so familiar, so familial in ways she doesn’t think she’d ever understood until she was here.

She can’t keep them out entirely, she doesn’t think, and some part of her feels panicky and terrified at the idea of not being able to reach out and feel them all here, around her: Simon’s love like warm sunlight on river rocks, Kaylee’s enthusiasm like bubbling water and bright greenery; Zoe and Wash together like a great tree stretching toward the clouds and down into the earth. Book feels like worn wood, pitted and scarred and worn smooth by use and careful caring; Inara feels like smoke, like incense, drifting and curling and beautiful, filling up the room. Jayne in her head is an old dog, stubborn and simple and content. Mal is a storm, ragged and powerful and fascinating, both terrifying and wonderful in turns.

Sometimes River thinks she’s rebuilding herself piece by piece, taking little bits of the others and putting them all together into something girl-shaped where she can live, a body made into a house made just for her. She thinks of Jubal Early, thinks of telling him  _ She faded away _ , telling him  _ I’m not on the ship; I am the ship _ , and thinks that maybe she was more right than she knew.

When she was seven, River got a gold medal at a dance competition.

When she was seventeen, River got a room on a ship named Serenity.

When she was twenty-seven—

Ah, but of course she hasn’t gotten there yet.

She is made of bits and scraps held together with hope and love, just like the lovely, ragged ship whose belly she sleeps in, whose veins she dances through, whose heart she lives in.

Serenity was named for losing, and River is lost, but with steady hands at their helm and sturdy folk at their back, they’ll keep going, despite the hardships, despite the uncertainty and unknowing.

It’s not much, but it’s enough. It will always, always be enough.

They’ll keep flying.

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea where this came from, but i wrote it all at once in a sudden burst of "holy god words gotta write them down asap", and then when it was done, i still really liked it, so i thought "fuck it" and posted it. i'm not sure it's entirely finished, but then, river's not entirely finished, either, is she?


End file.
